Sunday, December 30, 2012

Last year around this time I did a little post to wrap up the year, one of those "looking back" sorta deals. It was a nice way to put it all in perspective for myself, and it was an amazing year for me.

While 2012 didn't quite rock my world in the same way, it at least continued with me moving forward as a writer, defining my own personal mission statement, honing my craft, getting closer and closer to the writer I want to be. It saw some work that I'm rather proud of, and made me realize that it's okay to feel good about the direction I'm going in, even if I still don't feel that I'm THERE, 100 percent. But I reckon feeling like you're THERE is the proverbial Kiss of Death, right?

2012 saw the release of my second full length novel, CITY OF HERETICS, a bit of a departure from the meandering, Southern Gothic vibe of my first novel. CoH was tighter, meaner, more hardboiled (which seems to be the way my work has been going, of late). Working with Brian Lindenmuth at Snubnose Press was an absolute joy.

In the same week that CITY OF HERETICS was released, my FIGHT CARD novella, "Bluff City Brawler", came out under the pen name Jack Tunney. I'm grateful to Mel Odom and Paul Bishop for taking a chance on me, as it stretched my writing muscles and gave me the opportunity to try something different. I enjoyed it, and my only regret is that "Bluff City Brawler" fell by the wayside until recently while I was busy promoting the full-length novel. Since it's been on sale these last few days for .99 cents, that issue seems to be addressed.

David Cranmer of Beat to a Pulp Press picked up the publishing rights to my Hawthorne stories, after my relationship with the previous publisher came to an end. David re-issued "That Damned Coyote Hill", as well as "The Long Black Train" and "The Spider Tribe", and I'm pleased to tell you that we have a terrific working relationship based on respect and friendship. I just really like the guy, and there's more Hawthorne to come.

I'm wrapping up the year with a new story for an anthology from Andrew Nette and Crime Factory (that picture at the top is a major clue!), and a new Gideon Miles novella for Beat to a Pulp; both of those should be out early in 13, as well as a couple of short stories here and there.

I'm learning that this writing gig, especially when you're laboring away in the small presses, is a marathon, not a sprint. Way back in January of this year, I asked my friend Vincent Zandri how he manages to sell so many books, and what he told me struck home: "Keep writing them," he said. "Keep writing them and putting them out, and make sure they're ALL the best work you're capable of." Good advice, that.

So I'll keep writing them, and I'll keep putting them out, one way or another. And I promise you, they will ALWAYS be the best work I'm capable of.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

I'm getting a jump on this a little early, I know. And if I wind up reading a masterpiece between now and Jan 1, I'm sure I'll kick myself. But whatever-- I probably won't have time later.

I'm sorry to admit that my reading this year wasn't quite as diverse as last year. I mostly stuck to known quantities. But for all that, there were some real gems. Not all of them came out in '12, but most of them are fairly recent, regardless.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Andrew Nette is one of the editors and founders of Crime Factory, and the author of GHOST MONEY, from Snubnose Press. I'm happy to have him here at Psycho Noir today, talking about one of the major influences on his work.

Hello, Andrew...

Ghosts of Cambodia

Ask someone to name an exotic location to
set a crime novel and most people would probably answer Scandinavia or perhaps
Africa or Latin America.

I could be wrong, but I’d guess few people
would say Asia. This could be why there are so few crime novels set in the
region, even fewer noir or hardboiled novels.

My debut novel Ghost Money is an exception.

Ghost
Money is set in Cambodia the mid-nineties, the
point at which the
long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency started to fragment and the country was
torn by political instability.

It’s the
story of a disillusioned and somewhat fucked up Vietnamese Australian ex-cop called
Max Quinlan. Quinlan is hired to find an Australian businessman, Charles Avery,
missing in the chaos of Cambodia. It soon becomes clear Avery has made
dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking.

When I wrote the first draft in 2008,
there was even less crime fiction set in Asia than there is now, and hardly
anything featuring Cambodia.

One exception was Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, by Christopher G Moore. Moore is the doyen
of Bangkok’s large expatriate crime-writing scene. Since the early nineties, he
has been writing books featuring the Bangkok-based American PI, Vincent
Calvino. Most are set in Thailand, although Moore has also taken his character
to Vietnam and Cambodia.

His Cambodia book, Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, is my favourite. Calvino has been employed
by a shady businessman to find a grifter gone to ground in Phnom Penh.
Accompanying the PI is his regular off-sider Prachai Congwatana, a Lieutenant
Colonel in the Thai police.

But my major influence for writing Ghost Money is a little known 2002 film
by Matt Dillon called City of Ghosts.

It’s not a great film, but having worked on and off as a journalist in
Phnom Penh in the nineties and again in 2008, it’s a vivid depiction of a country
that is quickly changing in the face of rapid, if very uneven, economic
development.

Jimmy (Dillon) is a long con artist who grows a conscience after the fake
insurance company he’s been fronting forfeits on claims to the survivors of a
hurricane. In order to get his share of the proceeds from the scam and escape
the clutches of the FBI, Jimmy travels from New York to Thailand where Marvin
(James Caan), his mentor and the brains behind their operation has fled.

Landing in Bangkok, Jimmy meets up with another of Marvin’s associates,
Casper (Stellan Skarsgard), who informs him Marvin has gone to Cambodia. Jimmy
decides to follows him, arranging to meet up with Casper in Phnom Penh at a
hotel called the Belleville. Most frequent travellers to Asia will have
stayed in at least one place like the Belleville, a magnet for dead-beat
expats, burn-outs and tourists on expired visas, who hang around the bar
providing cryptic advice and Vietnam flashbacks to whoever will pay attention
and buy them drinks.

Casper and Jimmy locate Marvin, living like a king in a rundown French
colonial villa. He’s ploughed the proceeds from their insurance scam into a new
project, a proposed casino complex which he and his local partner, a former
high-ranking Cambodian military intelligence officer called Sideth, hope
will turn Cambodia into the Acapulco of Asia.

Marvin offers Jimmy a slice of the action, then heads off down south to
inspect his investment. In one of the film’s more surreal scenes, Marvin and
his entourage stop for the night in one of those cavernous discotheques that
are common in much of rural Asia. They do a little karaoke before all of
Marvin’s off-siders are killed and he disappears.

Jimmy, meanwhile, has returned to his room at the Belleville to find a
suitcase full of money and a note from Marvin telling him to get out of
Cambodia and start a new life. He’s deliberating whether to take Marvin’s
advice when he becomes involved with Sophie (Natasha McElhone), an
archaeologist whom he meets at the Belleville.

Then a young Khmer boy walks into the Bellville carrying a box. Inside are
a human foot, presumably Marvin’s, and a ransom demand for five million US
dollars in exchange for Marvin's life.

The plot of City of Ghosts is strictly B-movie. That’s not
necessarily a criticism in my book, but Dillon, who co-wrote and directed the
film as well as starring in it, struggles to elicit anything more than a
one-dimensional performance from virtually all his headline characters.

But these armchair criticisms aside, it was a pretty gutsy decision on
Dillon’s part to make an entire movie in Cambodia. The country had a thriving
film industry in the sixties and early seventies. This was completely
obliterated by the Khmer Rouge when they took power in 1975 and has only
started to recover in the last few years. Dillon would have had to bring in
virtually all his equipment and most of his crew and start shooting from
scratch.

More importantly despite its flaws, City of Ghosts has a strange
authenticity and rawness that latches onto you and keeps your attention.

Many of the foreign supporting actors were recruited from amongst the ranks
of Phnom Penh’s bizarre and eccentric local expatriate and backpacker
communities. The parlous state of Cambodia’s film industry resulted in
Dillon having to rely on local Khmers with little if any previous acting
experience.

The soundtrack features songs from Cambodia’s incredibly vibrant sixties music
scene. The camera work is fantastic. While the script may be clunky, there’s
nothing remotely resembling a B-movie about how City of Ghosts looks, particularly the way it interweaves light and
sound.

And as someone who has spent a lot of time in Cambodia, watching this film makes
me feel like a time traveller, seeing locations that have either changed beyond
recognition or no longer exist. I’ve tried to inject a similar quality of gritty
authenticity in my book, Ghost Money.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

You can always count on Nigel Bird to deliver a great story about great characters, and the novella "Mr. Suit" is no different in that regard. But in almost every other way, this one is a bit of a departure for our Mr. Bird-- instead of the contemplative, almost melancholy tone that readers have come to expect, this one is fast-paced, funny (in a really dark way) and violent. I'm happy to tell you that Bird succeeds just as admirably with this sort of story as he does with his other work. A complex protagonist with understandable motives and emotions, fully-fleshed out supporting characters, and a situation that balances on just this side of totally believable (even as things get more and more out of control, it always feels perfectly natural as things circle down the crapper for Liza). I can whole-heartedly recommend this one.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

I just realized it's been almost a month since I've posted anything here. Sorry 'bout that. My lack of attention to this blog has been due to a couple of things--

One- the new job. It's not a bad gig, as far as working for someone else goes. I almost even kind of like it. And I've actually made a couple of new friends, which is something I don't do, generally (I find it hard to make new friends, I don't know why-- I suspect it's because I'm very jealous of my time and usually the ten or twelve hours a day I'm at work provides me with all the human interaction I really need). Anyway, despite that the job is not bad, it takes up a lot of my time now, time I used to use for writing.

Two- using the little time left in my day for writing. That's sort of a given, I reckon. But even then, I have to admit I haven't been using my free time very well. When I get home, I'm sort of tired, and so most nights I elect to watch a movie or read, then go to bed instead of writing. "I'll get up early tomorrow morning and write before I go to work," I keep telling myself. And about half the time, I actually do that. No good.

And three- I haven't had much to say. Most of the things that interest me, or that I feel like I want to share with everyone, I've already said a hundred times, right? And after awhile, you start to feel that your deepest convictions couldn't possibly be of interest to anyone but yourself. So I'll start to write a blog post about something, then stop halfway through.

But despite that, I have a few things that have been on my mind that might be of interest to others. I'll be talking about those things here, before the year is over. Keep checking back, okay? I promise to be wildly entertaining again soon.

The Hawthorne stories are continuing to do remarkably well, each of them managing to sell a couple every day. And CITY OF HERETICS has really taken off since yesterday, when the price point went down to .99 cents (all the Snubnose titles are on sale through the holidays, you should jump on that).

Currently, I'm working on a new Gideon Miles story for Beat to a Pulp Press. Should've been done a month ago, but David Cranmer has been extraordinarily patient as I hammer it out. Also writing a tale for a new anthology being put together by Andrew Nette. After that, the Cash Laramie/Hawthorne cross-over.

I think that, when those are done, I'll be laying off work-for-hire for a few months so I can get back to the third novel.

Heath Lowrance

...is the author of HAWTHORNE: TALES OF A WEIRDER WEST, CITY OF HERETICS, THE BASTARD HAND, FIGHT CARD: "Bluff City Brawler" (as Jack Tunney) and DIG TEN GRAVES. His work has appeared at Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, Chi-Zine, Pulp Metal, The Nautilus Engine, and others. He has been a movie theater manager, a tour guide at Sun Studio, a singer in a punk band, and a regular donor of blood for money. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.